Sidebar: Gini is Out of The Bottle

My conservative counterpart was told he was welcome to “knock himself out” again when some of his comments didn’t come through to this blog (according to him) responding to my post critical of his post on a PolitiFact (PF) ruling on Alan Grayson, concerning the Gini co-efficient of wealth. He indeed self-immolated with a bunch of non-sensical points: his usual sentence-by-sentence parse in order to falsely complicate and conceal the over-riding issue of Alan Grayson’s remarks about wealth inequality as evaluated by the Truth-o-Meter.

Saying “You've been proved wrong on point after point and you simply dismiss it without addressing the arguments” is arrogantly absurd on its face…if it’s proof, it’s proof by verbosity. Just because HE says I’m proven wrong doesn't mean that I am, that's just what he thinks. Talk about  self-stultification (with admirable aplomb)! But OK, I’ll give him a break, he does offer one somewhat worthwhile point:

“As I pointed out, Grayson has no real argument unless wealth inequality has demonstrably ill effects.”

Either Bryan is out of touch with reality or just choosing to ignore the obvious for the sake of argument. I think I’d choose the latter because of his frequent intransigence when debating people (as I’ve provided many examples of in previous posts).

The recorded history of our planet is replete with the demonstrably ill effects of wealth inequality, as well as the apathy of the “1%”: from the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned to that of Marie Antoinette’s telling those without bread to eat cake, which was said to have sparked a revolution. Only this time through the skillful use of propaganda, some of those in the 99% ( I am assuming) such as Bryan are defending those telling them to eat cake.

Bryan referred me to such propaganda with a PBS video of an interview with Richard Epstein, a “libertarian” law professor, who claims there’s a “good side” to wealth inequality. If you read Epstein’s bio, by the way, nowhere does it say he teaches or has a background in economics. His background is law. Now, at the undergraduate and graduate level, he might have taken some economics courses (and note, this was during the 1960’s before the advent of Reaganomics/supply side economic theories), but that limit to his qualifications makes me somewhat wary of his economic opinions. Other than that, Epstein is also an “Adjunct Scholar” at the conservative Cato Institute, and his writings have been warmly regarded at the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute’s website.

But even with this background, I’m certainly not in a position to provide the correct explanation of the other side, why economic inequality “isn’t good for America.” So for this, there’s a video as well, an interview with economist Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. You can watch it below. His three pronged counter-argument to that of Epstein:

(1) There’s no guarantee that the wealthy would choose to invest their disproportionate share of wealth;

(2) There’s a disincentive to the wealthy to invest in a business when the mass of people (those who’d consume the business’s product) has been deprived of income;

(3) Historical records: America’s real income reached its zenith in the mid-seventies: since that time it has stagnated. Never before in our history have we had real wages not go up for 35 years.  If that was supposed to have good economic consequences, the historical proof certainly shows the opposite.

Grayson actually made things look better by using the 2000 Gini stats; Bryan’s “old data” claim is merely one more excuse, like that game where you throw something, anything (9 things?) at a Velcro wall to see if they will stick (where did I hear that?). So, I don’t have any proof? OK, then, if Bryan is a betting person, I’d like him to use something a LOT more tangible than rhetoric, and put his money where his mouth is. $1,000—that’s one thousand dollars—says that the U.S. Gini wealth co-efficient hasn’t changed much, or gotten worse (there’s even more wealth inequality in the U.S. since 2000) in 2010, or whenever it’s calculated world-wide again. And when those numbers are available, I’m going to be putting them here and all over Facebook and sending them to his blog so I can “wave them in his face.” I don’t think he’s going to take the bet.